to me, that’s preposterous. excommunication, things of that nature.
We do not even need to discuss the sad reign of Pope Benedict, who brought about as much respect to the Papacy as Rasho Nesterovic brought to the 2006 Lakers
This sounds like a Dennis Miller joke.
TAke a look, y’all: conclave.jpeg
STEPHEN A: Skip I want to ADDRESS this issue.
[BAYLESS nods]
You KNOW I am sensitive to the epidemic of child rape in the church
BAYLESS: Absolutely
STEPHEN A: BUT!
Until December 1996, AOL charged an hourly rate for internet. I remember going to my friend Robin’s house and us logging into their family’s AOL account for one hour. It was fascinating.
I also have an early memory of playing Legend of the Red Dragon on BBS. LORD came out in 1989. I was just a kid. It was a big deal (or I made it a big deal) when I discovered a fedora neckbeard guy decades my senior was using a loophole in the game to get infinite money and then level up all of his stats to the max. I let him know I thought what he was doing amounted to cheating and was clearly against the spirit of the game.
Then I started using the loophole too.
I used to logon to BBSes to download shareware games. I believe that’s how I first found Wolfenstein 3D and then sent ID money to get the full game. I still have the floppies. Definitely did that stuff in the early 1990’s (high school), maybe late 1980’s. The country’s biggest BBS, ExecPC, was in Milwaukee, so there were a million local numbers for me to use.
Used Prodigy, too.
My best friend in high school knew a guy who ran a porn BBS, called Jimbo’s BBS (he was a Russian guy named James, a little older than us). Jimbo invited us over to his house to see his BBS setup and, as two high school boys, we happily accepted. It wasn’t anything interesting, really, just a computer. After a while, though, the whole thing felt weird. We’re just in this guy’s basement and he’s showing us where he shares porn from. He offered to give us full paid access, but it was getting creepy, so we declined and went home. He later changed the name to Cherry Pie BBS to make it sound dirtier.
First “real” internet was first semester of college, fall 1994, since the dorms had a high speed network. A few of us had computers, someone installed Doom II on them, and all our grades went down.
Pretty much exactly the same as my story.
Hah it’s just like the second story in the Hearts in Atlantis collection where the college kids torch their grades by getting addicted to playing the card game Hearts. The sad thing in the story is that being in college is the only thing keeping the kids from going to Vietnam, which at the time they saw as a death sentence. Not even that was enough to get them to kick the game and save their grades.
I ran a BBS offering cracked C64 games. I got codes to dial long distance for free and would stay up all night downloading games, then sleep all day at school.
My dad. Had academic internet, so I used to use Gopher and Usenet at like 11 or 12. Like 92 93 I think?
I then go super hooked on a really bad MUD called Alatia
Guess theres a tiny record of it on the internet.
Wild to see this after nearly 30 years. I used to say I was sick and spend the whole day playing. It was awesome.
